The present invention pertains to printing systems, and particularly to apparatus and methods for distributing print jobs to one or more of a plurality of printers.
In the area of multi-processing, one of the ongoing challenges is to develop methods and workflows that lend themselves to efficient uses of parallel processing. Today, one of the most popular methods for describing documents, especially for printed delivery, is the well known PostScript® format, by Adobe Systems Incorporated. PostScript has many benefits and is almost universally employed in many print markets today. However, it has a limitation which creates a significant barrier to efficient parallel processing. In particular, within a PostScript file, the boundaries and content of individual pages are buried within the file, and can only be determined by processing the PostScript file in some manner to establish the page boundaries and content. One popular method to do this is to transform or convert a PostScript file into a portable document format (“PDF”) file, typically referred to as a “distilling” operation. This allows the page boundaries in a multi-page job to be established and thus allows multiple interpreters to operate on the pages individually, thus facilitating parallel processing. However, if the object is to process a job faster, one must take into account the time necessary to convert from a page dependent format as in the PostScript file to the desired page independent format as in a PDF file. This added conversion time will add to the overall time to complete the job.